Email Sales Funnels for Quick Conversions
Email sales funnels are critical components of any good marketing plan. By using automated messages to inspire action, your readers can be converted quickly into paying customers. Without an effective email sales funnel, you keep subscribers stuck, unsure of whether they should keep idling or move forward.
Of course, uncertainty wastes time, effort, and money. Therefore, to save resources, you need to build a streamlined delivery system.
What Are Email Sales Funnels?
Email sales funnels prompt people to take action or make a decision. They use automated messages to educate readers and promote your services and products. In other words, your email funnel is a specially engineered delivery system for converting your readers into customers. Therefore, email sales funnels are a critical component of email marketing.
Get Readers Where They Want to Go with Email Sales Funnels
To create effective email sales funnels, you need to know how to get people from point A (passive readers) to point B (paying customers). To put it another way, you’re mapping the shortest distance between the reader’s awareness to their choice to take action. Of course, that takes an intimate knowledge of how your audience thinks, behaves, and decides—which you’ll need to investigate.
Stages of the Reader’s Conversion Journey
While every reader’s journey is different, they all involve the same steps. Knowing these phases is integral to creating effective email sales funnels:
Attraction
You attract the reader to something you propose, provide, or promote.
Consideration
The reader entertains the idea of what it would be like to obtain your service or product.
Decision
They decide to take a risk, whether it’s providing their email address, making a purchase, giving feedback, or spreading the word about you.
Action
They click a call to action button, fill out a form, and eagerly await what you’ve promised them.
Components of Great Email Sales Funnels
After giving careful thought to what someone’s perfect conversion journey looks like, it’s time to build your email sales funnel. Like any delivery system, email sales funnels seamlessly guide readers from one part of the journey to another. Therefore, any effective email sales funnel focuses on the following progression:
1
Building Awareness—The widest part of your funnel is dedicated to generating public exposure through a landing page, trade shows, email campaigns, social media posts, or any other promotional activity.
2
Creating Interest—Once a reader is educated about what you provide, they move to the interest part of your email sales funnel. This is where you get the reader’s attention by giving them something valuable in exchange for their email address—like a giveaway, discount, or exclusive content.
3
Nurturing Trust—After giving you their email address, the reader moves to the next stage, which is an automated welcome series. This chain of messages continues to educate and inform them about what you’re offering.
4
Closing or Upselling—At the conclusion of your automated welcome series, the message will invite the reader to buy now, try a product demo, receive a free trial, or get a VIP discount. This message tells the reader exactly what step to take next.
5
Sustaining Engagement & Follow-up—Whether the reader takes action or not, will determine what happens next. New customers receive automated emails about product education and related offerings, as well as invitations to write reviews and share social media posts. Readers who didn’t seal the deal get added to a general broadcast list for long-term engagement and follow-up—another critical element of effective email marketing.
How Email Sales Funnels Help Your Business
Obviously, it’s complicated to create email sales funnels, so why invest the time? Because, like with any tool, they build things of lasting value—namely, loyal customers that are with you for a lifetime. Here are just some of the ways great email sales funnels benefit your business:
- Create automated and relevant messaging for each stage of the customer journey, all the way through to conversion and beyond.
- Make the repeated connections required to get readers to trust, like, and purchase from you.
- Break down your complicated product or service into a series of bite-sized, informative emails to educate readers so they can make informed choices.
- Have a sales solution that scales—so that no matter how many readers enter your email sales funnel, they all get handled properly.
Use Automation to Keep Funnels Filled
To be sure, sales is an art, but it’s also a science. And the science of sales has discovered some impressive statistics:
1. 63% of consumers need to hear a company’s value propositions three to five times before trust is conferred. That’s why automation gives your sales team the support they need to accomplish this level of repetition. And if you don’t have a sales force, automation becomes your promotional team.
2. 87% of consumers do business with vendors who provide valuable content at all stages of the buying process—which is what email sales funnels are built to do.
3. In conclusion, personalized, automated follow-up messages send sales into the stratosphere when they are well-designed and implemented by professionals.
Email Funnels Aren’t Just for Sales
While it’s true that we’ve focused this content on using email funnels for sales, there are lots of other reasons you might want to use this essential tool. Here are just a few:
- Onboard new customers
- Ask customers to give feedback, leave reviews, and answer surveys
- Provide helpful answers to frequently answered questions
- Re-engage an audience segment that is less than active
- Invite people to join a cause or take action
- Gauge interest through product pre-launches
And the list goes on. Any time you want to inspire people to do something or make a decision, ask yourself, “Can we use an email funnel for this?”
The Goal of Email Sales Funnels
Remember, whenever you implement a tool, it’s beneficial to keep its ultimate function in mind. And the function of email sales funnels is simple: to convert your traffic into sales or appointments automatically. If you’re ready to create return customers with lifetime value, Email Broadcast can help you fulfill this mission for your business.
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